At a certain Connemara hotel a curious visitor, hearing the orders shouted out: “Bacon and eggs for a lady,” “Bacon and eggs for a gentleman,” “Bacon and eggs for a priest,” ventured to inquire the differentiation. The answer was prompt and simple.
“Wan egg for a lady; two for a gentleman; and three for a priest!”
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I have solemnly sworn my family that when I die I am not to be buried in a “Necropolis.” Horrible thought, a “city” of the dead! To hate the herd when living, and to be forcibly associated with it till the Day of Judgment, if not evicted to make room for fresh tenants!
In the very early months of my marriage we were obliged to take up our abode in a large northern town, for Loki’s future grandfather had to study certain aspects of newspaper management. Never was anything more difficult to find than a roof for our heads in that place of teeming activities. Worn out with a long and fruitless search we were at last landed in a higher quarter of the town at the house of a dentist! The dentist was going away for a holiday, and was ready to put at our disposal, for a consideration, the whole of the clean, fresh, quite unobjectionable little abode, reserving only one room—his chamber of horrors!
I interviewed an elderly thin-faced lady, with, as became a dentist’s mother, a very handsome smile. She brought me to the window. We looked down on waving tree-tops and a wide space of green in the gathering dusk of the September evening.
“You see,” she said, “we have a most pleasant view.”
I gazed. That stretch of green silence and restfulness, after all those sordid roaring streets, decided me.
“We will take the house!” I cried, in a hurry lest we should miss such a chance.
“I always think,” said the dentist’s mother, smiling still more broadly, “that it is a great advantage to be opposite the Necropolis.”
Poor innocent as I was, and country bred, I had no idea of the meaning of the word.
I was soon to discover. Funerals are of more than daily occurrence in a mighty city. Oh! the processions that I stared down upon from the drawing-room window, through the fog and the rain—gloom generally enveloped that centre of manufactures! I was left long hours alone; no one but an impertinent French maid with whom I could exchange my ideas. The proceedings in the Necropolis had a hypnotic attraction for me. I began to feel quite certain that it was gaping for my poor little bones, and that they must inevitably rest there. Finally, I extracted a solemn oath that, whatever happened, this should not be the case—a promise momentarily soothing, but far from lifting the weight of depression that pressed upon me.